“Mr. Merritt,” she said, glancing at Wanda, the court transcriber she’d brought with her, making sure the woman wasn’t missing anything. “On the morning of April thirtieth of this year, you held a stockholders’ meeting, did you not?”
He flipped through his day planner. “Yep. That’s right.”
“And in that meeting, isn’t it true that you misrepresented company earnings for the previous fiscal period?”
“Mrs. Clark—”
“Nichols,” she said. “My name is Nichols.”
“Of course. A fireman’s wife.” He stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing his cowboy boots at the ankles. Folding his arms over his chest, he laughed. “Why do they need a paid fire department in a podunk town like Newpointe, anyway? Looks to me like a waste of taxpayers’ money. What did you say your husband’s name is?”
Jill wasn’t biting. “I didn’t say. Mr. Merritt,” she said, passing him a copy of the minutes of that shareholders’ meeting, “I’d like you to turn to page eight of these minutes and read aloud the earnings figures you gave to the stockholders on that day.”
He cleared his throat and shifted in his chair, and his lawyers leaned in with him to find the passage in question.
He had lied that day, and she had audit reports to prove it.
“Mr. Merritt, we’re waiting. Please read the section I’ve marked.”
A shrill, piercing sound blared overhead, startling her. Her transcriber jumped to her feet.
“Is that a fire alarm?” Jill asked.
“Yeah,” Merritt said in that lazy drawl of his. “Bad timing, huh? Guess we’d better get outta here.”
Jill didn’t stand. The man was slick. She had to hand it to him. He had probably told someone to sound the alarm at exactly 10:20 A.M., right about the time Jill would be asking the tough questions.
“Should we go?” Wanda asked, already starting to load her transcribing machine into its case.
Jill touched her hand, signaling for her to stay put.
One of the lawyers got up and went to the window. “No sign of smoke.”
“Probably a drill,” Merritt said, stretching up out of his slump. “But you can never be sure. Guess we oughta go.”
Jill looked through the conference room’s glass doors into the reception area. She could see two women getting up from their desks, looking around as if trying to decide what to do.
The phone on the table buzzed, and Merritt snatched it up. “Merritt. Yeah.” He stood up. “The stockroom? That’s right below us. Yeah, we’re going.”
Merritt hung up the phone, his face suddenly serious. “Bomb threat. We have to get out.” He pointed through the doors. “Head for one of the exits. Don’t take the elevators.”
Jill was still skeptical, but she didn’t wait for further instructions. She grabbed her briefcase and pushed through the glass doors. The two administrative assistants still in the office held the doors for them, and Jill let Wanda pass her to head for the exit.
“Leave everything!” Merritt called out. “Just go! Hurry up! Down the stairwells. Now!”
His voice sounded panicked. Jill was not inclined to trust him. Still, his face had changed with that phone call. He’d said something about the stockroom. Did that mean they’d actually found a bomb?
She headed for the north exit, behind a few others who’d come from offices across the hall. Merritt and the others rushed for the other one on the south side of the building. As she stepped through the exit door, she heard hundreds of feet filling the stairwell beneath her, people laughing nervously and chattering as they descended. There was no panic, and no particular rush.
No one seemed to be taking the alarm all that seriously. Yes, Merritt had probably set the whole thing up. If that was the case, she would make him pay.
It probably wouldn’t take too much digging to find out who’d sounded the alarm and why.
She reached the twenty-seventh floor, then the twenty-sixth.
Thoughts of how she could prove it raced through her mind. Maybe she should go back up right now and check the twenty-ninth-floor stockroom. She paused and turned back. . . .
An explosion above her shook the building.
With a searing whoosh, it lifted her off her feet and slammed her into the wall. She dropped her briefcase and tried to cover her head, but the stairs beneath her crumbled, and she fell with them, grabbing and clawing until she hit solid footing.
She heard screaming above her.
She tried to think. A bomb had gone off. People were hurt.
She looked up and saw fire crackling like a taunting monster, its sound like sheets being shaken in the wind. Smoke was thickening the air, filling the stairwell, choking her. She heard a crack, and a flaming ceiling tile dropped down next to her, almost hitting her.
Jill forced herself to her feet. Beneath the debris, it looked as if the stairs below her still held. She didn’t know what floor she had fallen to, but she doubted that anyone behind her had survived.
She started down, pulling the neck of her blouse up over her nose, trying to get as far from the smoke and flames as she could. She caught up with those below her. They all looked shell-shocked and glassy-eyed, desperate to make their way down.
Suddenly, a girl came running up, against the flow of traffic, fighting the people in her way.
“Mom! Mom!” Terror undulated on her voice. “Mama!”
Jill caught the girl to keep her from going higher. “Honey, you can’t go up there. There was an explosion.”
The girl tried to wrestle herself free. “My mother’s up there! I don’t think she got down! I have to go after her!”
“No. There’s fire and the ceiling’s caving in. The stairs have collapsed. You have to go down. We have to get out.”
The girl broke free and kept going up, until she reached the wall of smoldering debris. She started to cough.
Jill looked down, torn between saving herself and going back up to stop the girl. Finally, she turned. “Honey, please! Come with me.”
“I have to find her!” the girl sobbed. “Mama!”
The terrified scream tore through the stairwell, reverberating off every surface, vibrating in Jill’s chest. She reached for the girl. “Honey, come with me, please. We have to get down. It’s dangerous here.”
“I don’t care!”
“Maybe your mother went down the other stairwell,” Jill cried.
The girl looked down at her now, hope seeping back into her smoke-stained face.
“Come on, sweetheart. We’ll look for her at the bottom.”
Still sobbing, the girl nodded and started down. They made it down two more flights and caught up to the others on the stairwell. Thousands of employees were trying to evacuate, glutting the small space.
A man sat on the steps, bottlenecking the traffic. People yelled for him to move, but he didn’t get up. When Jill reached him, she bent down. “Sir, are you all right?”
He shook his head. “My leg. I can’t get up.”
“You have to. Come on, I’ll help you. Hurry!”
He tried to stand, but she saw the pain on his face. “Go around me,” he said. “It’s okay. I’m going to slow you down.”
“No. You can do it.” She slipped her shoulder under his arm and tried to lift him. “Here, lean on me.”
“No,” he said, “just go. It’s okay.”
“I’m not leaving you!” she shouted. “Now get up and lean on me!”
He got up and did as he was told. She put her shoulder under his armpit on the side where he’d hurt his leg and tried to help him walk.
How would she get him down alone?
Then the sobbing girl turned and looked up at them. Wiping her face, she came and slipped her shoulder under his other arm.
“Thank you, honey,” Jill said. “We can do this.”
For the first time Jill noticed the girl’s multiple piercings and tattoos. Tears streaked the smoke soot on her face.
The man
winced with pain as they pulled him with them.
“Between the two of us you’re going to get out of here,” she said.
He looked behind him, as if the flames pursued them.
“Don’t look back,” Jill said. “Look down and let’s move as fast as we can. My name’s Jill Nichols. What’s yours?”
“Gordon Webster,” he grunted.
Jill looked at the girl. “And yours?”
“Ashley Morris.”
“Okay,” Jill said. The air was getting thick with smoke, and she was starting to feel dizzy. “Gordon, I know it hurts, but we’ve got to move faster.”
Her pep talk seemed to work. He tried to help.
But the stairwell grew even more crowded, and wailing people tried to make their way down with breakneck speed. With all her might she tried to support the man’s weight.
“It’s no use,” he said. “I can’t make it.”
“Of course you can,” Jill said. “Come on, Gordon, we can do this! You don’t want to die in this building.”
They were practically dragging him down the stairs, and she looked at the girl and wondered if she should tell her to leave them and go. At this pace, all three of them could die here, if the top floors began to collapse further. Ashley started to cough, and Jill longed for clean air.
She concentrated with all her might on getting down, one step at a time.
She wondered what floor they were on now. She couldn’t have fallen more than one or two flights, and she’d come down two or three flights since the explosion. That would put her somewhere around the twenty-first floor, maybe. Then she saw the number 18 on the door of one of the landings and started to count again. They reached the seventeenth, the sixteenth . . . and an urgent prayer ran through her mind. Lord, please save us. Don’t let us die in this building.
Chapter Three
Ray Ford heard the yelling from his office at Newpointe’s Midtown Fire Station and went to his door. Several of his firefighters stood at the entrance of the TV room, watching a news report.
“Somebody call me?” he asked.
“Chief, you gotta see this!” George Broussard called out. “They got a fire at Icon. Sayin’ it was a bomb.”
Ray pushed through his men and turned up the volume. The cameras were fixed on the upper floors of the New Orleans corporation. Smoke and flames billowed out in red and black fury, engulfing at least the top five floors. There would be massive casualties, he thought. Maybe even hundreds killed.
“You think it’ll be a five alarm, Chief?” George asked.
“Could be.” Only forty minutes from New Orleans, Newpointe was among the departments expected to respond in a five-alarm emergency. There hadn’t been one since the protocol had been set up, but after September 11, big cities across the country had prepared for catastrophic disasters.
He went to a telephone, dialed the number for the New Orleans chief. The line was busy.
The second he hung up, it rang. George, who had house watch duty, grabbed it up. “Midtown.”
Ray looked at him, waiting.
“Will do.” George hung up. “Five alarm. They need every ladder and engine in the area. Ambulances too.”
Organized chaos followed as the men pulled on their turnout gear.
“Terrorists,” Cale Larkin said. “Gotta be terrorists.”
“Get every available tank and mask,” Ray shouted. “And I’m calling in everybody we’ve got. Let’s go!”
Painting someone else’s business wasn’t exactly the way Dan Nichols would have chosen to spend his day off from the fire department. But Mark Branning was his best friend in the department, and he and Allie had been desperately trying to sell the Blooms ’n’ Blossoms. A potential buyer was coming from Lafayette to look at the place tomorrow, and the front room needed a coat of paint. Mark had asked Dan for help in getting it done.
Ordinarily, Dan would have spent the day hunting or fishing or hiking through one of the wildlife refuges outside of town. Or he would have hit the road and run seven miles instead of his usual five. He might have gone to the gym and picked up a game of basketball. Then he would have taken his wife to lunch. He knew Jill would have a lot to talk about when she finished deposing Donald Merritt.
But this was probably going to take all day.
“I really appreciate this, buddy,” Mark said as he rolled the wall opposite him. “It’s above the call of duty.”
“Yeah, well. You owe me.” Dan glanced back to see how much Mark had gotten done. He had already covered half the wall. Dan rolled faster.
Justin, Mark and Allie’s three-year-old son, picked up a brush and slopped it into Dan’s paint tray.
“Justin, what am I gonna do with you?” He threw his arm around Justin’s waist and lifted him out of harm’s way.
“I wanna help!” The brush dripped from the child’s hand, pale yellow. Not a color that Dan would have chosen.
Mark took Justin from him and carried him like a sack of flour. “Allie, he’s dripping paint on the floor. Quick. Grab a wet rag.”
“Justin!” Abandoning the wreath that she was putting together for a funeral, Allie came into the front room and kissed his exposed round belly, eliciting screaming giggles. Mark set him down.
“You can’t help Daddy paint right now,” she said. “I told you, you need to stay in here with me.”
“I can do it!” Justin cried. “I paint good.”
“But the Wiggles are on. Don’t you want to watch?”
Distracted, Justin settled down.
“I think we should let him help,” Dan offered on a chuckle. “He can have my roller.”
“That could be dangerous.” Mark went back to his paint. Dan’s competitive nature kicked in again, and he began to roll as if his time was running out.
In the other room, Justin’s whining had turned to giggles.
The sound of a child’s laughter was music to Dan. He couldn’t wait to have one of his own. He and Jill had been praying for pregnancy for the last few months, but it hadn’t happened yet. When they’d first married, he’d wondered if he even had it in him to be a good father. Since his own parents had practically abandoned him to a series of nannies paid to love him, he’d had no real parental models.
That is, until Mark and Allie had shown him how easy it was to love a child.
Even though their lives seemed to revolve around that little bundle of energy, they were happier than he’d ever seen them.
Instead of hiring sitters or slapping him in day care, they dreamed of selling the flower shop so Allie could stay home full-time with Justin. But there were no buyers. She had to keep the business viable and profitable if she had any hope of selling it, so she came to work every day, bringing Justin with her, and spent more time pulling him out of trouble than she did making the floral arrangements that kept her afloat.
He heard the volume come up on the television that played softly in the background most of the day, and suddenly Allie called out, “Oh, no! Mark, come here! Hurry!”
Dan rolled faster. He had the advantage now.
Mark went into the other room, then cried out, “Dan, get in here!”
Something was wrong. Dan put the paint roller back into its tray and went into the other room.
“What’s going on?” Then he saw, on the TV screen, the Icon International Building with flames shooting out the roof and clouds of black smoke billowing out the blown-out walls on the top few floors.
“Some kind of explosion,” Mark said.
The sight paralyzed Dan. He stared at the screen as his heart slammed against his chest. Jill! She had gone there this morning!
He clutched the wall and searched around for the phone. Where did they keep it? He’d been in here a million times. Finally he remembered the cell phone he kept on his hip, and he pulled it off its belt clip and dialed Jill’s cell phone. It rang.
“Where was she?” Allie asked him. “What floor?”
Jill wasn’t answering. “The top on
e,” he said.
It kept ringing. Allie went into Mark’s arms, and they stared at him in horror, waiting.
Finally, he hung up and dialed her office. Maybe she hadn’t gone. Maybe there was traffic, or the meeting had been cancelled.
“Hello!” Her secretary shouted the greeting.
“Sheila, this is Dan.”
“Oh, Dan, it’s terrible, isn’t it? Just terrible.”
“Sheila, tell me where Jill is. Was she in that building?”
“Yes!” Sheila cried. “She was on the top floor. That’s where the meeting was at ten o’clock, and they’re saying the bomb went off at ten-twenty.”
He fell back against the wall and cut the phone off. Mark and Allie stared at him. Justin had suddenly gone quiet, as if he sensed the terror building in the room.
“I’ve got to get to her.”
Mark let Allie go. “Let’s go to the fire station, buddy,” he said. “We can get information there.”
Dan didn’t answer. He rushed out of the flower shop and sprinted as fast as he could the two blocks to the Midtown fire station, with Mark on his heels.
Nick Foster and his wife, Issie, had arranged their schedule so that they both could be off today. The firefighter and paramedic sat in Nick’s pastoral office at the Calvary Bible Church, sifting through paperwork that he had been putting off for weeks. Issie had never been a secretary and did not want to be one now, but she figured her EMT skills came in handy for the paperwork triage that would free her husband from some of his responsibilities. It was tough being the wife of a bivocational pastor, but she had to say that the worst of the days since she had married him had been better than any of the days before.
“So where’s the prayer request clipboard?” she said. “Lisa Manning had a request that came in Sunday.”
Nick reached for the clipboard hanging on his wall and tossed it across the desk to her. The radio station he listened to that played Christian music twenty-four hours a day crackled, then beeped as a news alert broke in.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a news bulletin from Canal Street in New Orleans,” the disc jockey said. “It seems that an explosion occurred at ten-twenty this morning at the Icon International Building. The bomb seems to have originated on one of the top floors in the thirty-story building. It is not yet known how many people were killed or even if they have been able to evacuate the entire building, but we would ask that our listening audience please pray for the people in that building and the rescue workers trying to get them out.”